April 08, 2015

Articles on the Religious Freedom Fiasco

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult[s] should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, on middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

Bruni enlists liberal Evangelical professor David Gushee in his crusade: “Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people.”

So, having defined the enemy, the one thing standing between them and cultural hegemony, what do they propose to do? This (emphasis mine):

Creech and Mitchell Gold, a prominent furniture maker and gay philanthropist, founded an advocacy group, Faith in America, which aims to mitigate the damage done to L.G.B.T. people by what it calls “religion-based bigotry.”

Gold told me that church leaders must be made “to take homosexuality off the sin list.”

His commandment is worthy — and warranted.

Not “must be persuaded,” but “must be made.” Compelled. Forced. And not forced to change our behavior, but forced to change what we believe. Because You Must Approve.

And just how do Bruni and his militant Social Justice Warriors plan to force us to repudiate our beliefs? We are going to find out. Indiana and Arkansas showed that most Americans don’t much care about religious liberty — and in fact, people like Bruni and the newspaper he works for have contempt for it, at least when it is practiced by “conservative Christians.”

Our worship is now compelled and instructed, just as in days past. But we are not dealing with a state church, or at least not an established one. We are dealing with a cultural intelligentsia that offers us a grand bargain: we can give up our sexual ethics and be just fine, or we can hold onto them and be smashed into conformity. It’s really this stark: the Bible should be “rightly bowing”–Bruni’s actual phrase!–to secular rationalism. In other words, we have an authority, and it is not Scripture. It is the culture.

[S]egregationists felt justified by scripture too. They got over it; their churches got over it; so will yours.

It’s not that simple. The debate about race was very specific to America, modernity, the South. (Bans on interracial marriage were generally a white supremacist innovation, not an inheritance from Christendom or common law.) The slave owners and segregationists had scriptural arguments, certainly. But they were also up against one of the Bible’s major meta-narratives — from the Israelites in Egypt to Saint Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.”

That’s not the case with sex and marriage. The only clear biblical meta-narrative is about male and female. Sex is an area of Jewish law that Jesus explicitly makes stricter. What we now call the “traditional” view of sexuality was a then-radical idea separating the early church from Roman culture, and it’s remained basic in every branch of Christianity until very recently. Jettisoning it requires repudiating scripture, history and tradition in a way the end of Jim Crow did not.

Memories Pizza didn’t blast out a news release. They didn’t contact the media, nor make a stink on Twitter or Facebook. They didn’t even post a sign in the window rejecting gay-wedding catering jobs. They merely answered questions from a novice reporter who strolled into their restaurant one day – who was sent on a mission by an irresponsible news organization.

7. Andrew Walker has an idea for how Christian bakeries could respond to governmental coercion in “A Note from Creator Cakes”:

So, we will serve same-sex wedding services. We will do so unhappily and with a bothered conscience. But if we must do so with a bothered conscience, we reserve the right as a condition of the marketplace to bother others' consciences as well. If we are coerced into baking for events we disagree with, we will return the favor and use the funds of those we disagree with to fund the organizations they disagree with. If you are unhappy with this new policy or it conflicts with your own convictions about marriage, we invite you to take your business elsewhere.

Ron, the articles above are mainly about the reaction we're seeing to religious freedom, rather than the Indiana RFRA proper, and that's why I've posted them here (you can see my point from the excerpts I posted). The revision doesn't negate any of them, whether they came before or after. Ross Douthat's article does defend the original Indiana RFRA (and by extension, RFRAs in general—something that's needed, since more are to come), but also came after the revision. (In fact, now that I look at them, the only articles that date pre-"fix" are the ones that explain what happened to Memories Pizza.)

I haven't posted anything on the revision, which actually makes the situation worse than what they had in Indiana before, in terms of religious freedom. The RFRA allowed people a day in court to make their case and provided a test to balance religious freedom with other concerns. The revision preemptively declares same-sex marriage the winner every time. (You can read more about that here.)

The details of that revision, while they're bad for liberty, are less important than what this situation has revealed about our country's new view of religious liberty, and since I'm limited (and took the weekend off for Easter), that's what I've focused on.

In other words, it eliminates any balancing test for sexual liberty and religious liberty. It says sexual orientation should trump religious liberty.

The RFRA side never even claimed that religious liberty should always trump sexual orientation. All it did was give people a chance to argue their case in court. Now, when it comes to same-sex weddings, no objection is allowed.

Say what I mean? You asked me what the "fix" took away, and that's what it takes away. Rather than having courts consider individual cases, it says sexual liberty always trumps religious liberty. That's worse for religious freedom than it was before the RFRA was passed.

Or maybe you didn't understand my sentence because you don't understand how RFRAs work. I'll just point you to this.